Principle 1: IFAD will promote scaled-up investment in multiple-benefit approaches for sustainable agricultural intensification.
As set out in paragraph 9, this means locally adapted, pro-poor, sustainable agricultural intensification techniques that recognize the complexity of people’s interaction with landscapes. An important feature of such approaches is that they provide multiple benefits for production, poverty reduction and the environment, including maintaining ecosystem services and biodiversity, reducing emissions and building climate resilience. Landscape approaches supported by spatial analysis can identify how investments or management practices in different parts of a landscape or watershed can produce benefits or reduce negative impacts on other parts, to provide ‘connectivity’ of hydrological systems or wildlife habitat, etc. There may also be landscape-scale relationships through farmer organizations (economies of scale in marketing, providing inputs to one another or collective action, including political action); or for greening value chains across a whole landscape. As energy costs rise, such approaches present sustainable non-energy-intensive alternatives for production.
Principle 2: IFAD will promote recognition and greater awareness of the economic, social and cultural value of natural assets
Global recognition is increasing the need to understand the range of environmental values, the costs and benefits of environmental impacts, the value of ecosystems and biodiversity1 and the goods and services they provide. Values can include both direct and indirect costs, but especially social and cultural values relevant to local communities and indigenous peoples. A higher valuation is critically important to increasing production, measuring change in environmental well-being, ensuring sustainability and providing better health and nutrition for poor rural people. This can be done implicitly in project and policy design through recognizing the importance of maintaining the health of natural assets – or where possible explicitly measured, so that management of the natural environment and its well-being are appropriately costed over time.
Principle 3: IFAD will promote climate-smart approaches to rural development
As set out in the Climate Change Strategy, this involves the systematic integration of climate change – along with other risks, opportunities and themes – into development programmes, policies and activities. It requires innovative approaches to enabling poor rural producers to adapt – especially women and indigenous peoples – by reducing risk and building resilience to climate change; helping poor rural farmers take advantage of available adaptation and mitigation incentives and funding; and informing a more coherent dialogue on climate change, rural development, agriculture and food security (see paragraph 11).
Principle 4: IFAD will promote greater attention to risk and resilience in order to manage environment and natural-resource-related shocks
To enhance the resilience of poor rural people, IFAD will step up its efforts to manage: risk exposure; risk and vulnerability analysis; knowledge and weather information services; linkages between ecosystem health and disaster preparedness/risk-reduction activities; and locally adapted and robust production systems – and to promote livelihood and income diversification and social safety nets. Ecosystem health, income diversification and participatory management are critical to withstanding increasing shocks and decreasing nutrition. IFAD will strengthen linkages with agencies and stakeholders engaged in disaster risk reduction and resilience-building efforts and build poor rural people's resilience through the forging of concrete field-rooted partnerships with United Nations agencies, international financial institutions (IFIs) and other partners.
Principle 5: IFAD will promote engagement in value chains to drive green growth
The growing integration of local and international value chains 2 represents an important potential driver for scaling up environmentally sound practices and promoting inclusive green growth, but with significant downside risks if market entry comes at the cost of widespread conversion of landscapes to monocropping. A number of major global food purchasers are announcing sustainable-agriculture purchasing standards – these represent an opportunity for poor rural people, who in many cases are already practising low-input production techniques (see paragraph 20 and best-practice statement (iii) in annex I).
Principle 6: IFAD will promote improved governance of natural assets for poor rural people by strengthening land tenure and community-led empowerment. 3
Environmental degradation is often fundamentally due to governance failures.4 These failures need rectifying locally, nationally and internationally, for example by: promoting the rule of law, appropriate environmental policies and legislation, and an international valuation of emissions; improving security of tenure; and avoiding environmentally damaging subsidies. Empowering local communities and individuals to manage and drive their own development processes, and to provide legal recognition and protection of their rights to access, control and use of natural resources is fundamental to good governance and effective programme design. Building resilience for users of extensive common-pool resources requires the explicit support and recognition of local management systems and tenure. IFAD recognizes the importance of improving access to land and tenure security5 and is supporting ongoing international initiatives promoting good land governance and responsible and equitable investments in agriculture. These are: (i) the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)-initiated process of developing voluntary guidelines for responsible governance of tenure of land and other natural resources; and (ii) a process for developing principles for responsible agricultural investment facilitated by the World Bank, FAO, IFAD and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). 6
Principle 7:IFAD will promote livelihood diversification to reduce vulnerability and build resilience for sustainable natural resource management
Livelihood diversity is an essential prerequisite for reducing risk, building resilience and providing food security. Off-farm sources of income and access to varied, secure natural assets, income opportunities and markets can reduce pressure on ecosystems and avoid poverty-driven depletion of natural assets. IFAD will strengthen its ongoing support and complement them with proposed NRM-focused approaches to promoting livelihood diversification opportunities and improved access to markets and income opportunities.
Principle 8: IFAD will promote equality and empowerment for women and indigenous peoples in managing natural resources.8
IFAD has long recognized the importance of investing in women. Risks associated with climate change magnify existing inequalities between women and men and differences in their capacity to cope. IFAD’s focus on gender equality and women’s empowerment will continue to be a valuable strategy for responding to climate change. Indigenous peoples are among those least responsible for climate change, yet are often the most vulnerable to it, especially because their livelihoods invariably depend on access to healthy natural resources and biodiversity.9 Respecting the principle of free, prior and informed consent, IFAD will support indigenous peoples in enhancing the resilience of the ecosystems in which they live and in developing innovative adaptation measures and emerging opportunities for indigenous peoples’ engagement in carbon sequestration and the provision of other environmental services. IFAD will be guided by its policy on Engagement with Indigenous Peoples, including its contribution to the realization of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Principle 9: IFAD will promote increased access by poor rural communities to environment and climate finance
It will seek new opportunities for poor rural people and smallholders to benefit from new and existing climate finance from public and private sources. It will also promote measures to ensure that private financing through commercial partners integrates environmentally conscious lending for channelling international capital flows to loan projects, and that these commercial institutions promote internationally recognized environmental standards, including the screening of investments through appropriate environmental assessment procedures.
Principle 10: IFAD will promote environmental commitment through changing its own behaviour
While integrating ENRM across its operations and advocating that partners adopt more-sustainable practices, IFAD must also set an example of efficiency and sustainability in its own operations. This requires ongoing investment to green its operations, focusing especially on travel, procurement and buildings.
1/ TEEB, Climate Issues Update. (Bonn: TEEB/UNEP, 2009); IBRD/World Bank, Where is the Wealth of Nations? (Washington, D.C.: IBRD, 2006); United Nations Millennium Assessment Board, Millennium Ecosystems Assessment.(Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2005).
2/ A value-chain intervention is one that finances the necessary activities to address constraints on the development of a particular agricultural product (e.g. input supply, market-oriented technology development and its transfer, infrastructure development, credit and capacity-building) to facilitate access to markets for sale at the appropriate point – either in raw, semi-processed or fully processed form. A pro-poor value-chain intervention develops approaches to include poor people in the chains, with a view to increasing their incomes, primarily through improvement in farm-gate prices and addressing constraints in a coordinated manner. IFAD, Pro-poor Rural Value-Chain Development Report. (Rome, forthcoming 2011).
3/ The IFAD Policy on Improving Access to Land and Tenure Security is available on the website (Arabic | English | French | Spanish)
4/ IFAD, Rural Poverty Report 2011 (see note 37).
8/ The IFAD indigenous peoples and gender policies are available on the website
9/ The IFAD Strategic Framework 2011-2015 identifies indigenous peoples as an important target group because they face economic, social, political and cultural marginalization in the societies in which they live, resulting in extreme poverty and vulnerability for a disproportionate number of them.
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